With the confirmation of Maureen Jensen because the new chair and chief executive of the Ontario Securities Commission, companies and investors can get the problem of women on boards to stay the main thing on the OSC’s agenda.
Jensen was nominated recently to exchange former OSC chair Howard Wetston by Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa. At that time, Sousa designated Jensen’s work in implementing Ontario’s new “comply or explain” disclosure regime, which aims to improve the representation of women on boards of directors and in executive officer positions.
In mid-November 2015, Canadian regulators released company-specific data on the representation of woman on boards and in senior management for 722 TSX-listed companies after releasing new “comply or explain” rules a year earlier designed to encourage companies to place more women on their boards and in executive suites.
The is a result of the searchable database originate from that exercise.
One caveat though, the data was derived from regulatory year-end filings in the period Dec. 31, 2014 to March 31, 2015 so a search of some TSX-listed companies are missing from the list.
An OSC spokesperson said they expect to “round out our sample within the coming months by completing reviews of issuers with year-ends outside the period Dec. 31, 2014 to March 31, 2015.”
